What I Actually Think About Professional Learning Environments

I have been in education long enough to know that the most valuable learning I have done rarely happened inside a classroom. It happened in conversations, in late-night rabbit holes that started with one question and ended somewhere entirely unexpected, and in feedback from people who had nothing to gain from being generous with their time. That is what a professional learning environment actually is, at its best. Not a platform. Not a structured program. Not a badge. A network of people and resources that pushes your thinking forward when no one is requiring you to grow.

Coming into this PhD journey, I already had a version of that network. Years of working in K-12 education across Africa, building curriculum, leading production teams, and eventually founding a nonprofit taught me early that learning does not wait for institutional permission. You find the people doing interesting work, you pay close attention to how they think, and you contribute something back whenever you can. That informal rhythm is what kept me growing long before I had academic language to describe it. Looking back, I was building a professional learning network before I knew what to call it.

What this course has helped me do is put structure and intention behind something I was doing intuitively. A professional learning network is not something that happens to you. It is something you build deliberately, tend carefully, and are willing to rebuild when it stops serving where you are trying to go. I think a lot of people treat their networks as static, a list of connections accumulated over time without much thought about what those connections are actually doing for their learning or their work. The more honest question is: who in your network is genuinely challenging how you think? Who is sharing the uncomfortable parts of their journey, not just the wins? And are you doing the same for others?

I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with a friend who had deleted her Instagram four years ago because the community there had stopped serving her learning. She did not make a big announcement about it. She just quietly moved her attention somewhere more useful. That kind of intentional curation is, I think, what distinguishes a professional learning network from just having a lot of followers. It is about quality of engagement, not volume of connections. As I continue through this program, that is the standard I want to hold myself to, building a network that is worth the attention I give it and being the kind of node in someone else's network that is worth following back.

Comments

  1. Alex E. DaleyMay 31, 2026 at 6:12 PM

    The distinction you're drawing between curation and accumulation is one I don't think gets made enough. Most advice about building a PLN focuses on adding — more connections, more platforms, more voices — when the harder and more valuable skill is actually subtracting. Your friend's quiet Instagram exit is a better model than most intentional "network building" strategies I've come across.
    What strikes me about your framing is that you're describing a kind of network literacy that most people only develop after years of getting it wrong first. The K-12 and nonprofit context you came from probably accelerated that — when resources are tight and the stakes are real, you get good at figuring out fast whose thinking is actually worth your attention.
    The question I'd push on a little: how do you hold that standard without the network becoming an echo chamber? The people who challenge how we think and the people who share our values aren't always the same people — and there's probably a tension worth sitting with between curating for quality and staying genuinely open to friction. The most useful nodes in a network are sometimes the ones that are a little uncomfortable to follow.
    The part about being worth following back is the piece that sticks with me most. It reframes the whole thing as a responsibility, not just a strategy.

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